Learning to walk allows infants to travel faster and farther and explore more of their environments. In turn, walking may have a cascading effect on infants' communication and subsequent responses from caregivers. We tested for an "inflection point"--a dramatic shift in the developmental progression--in infant communication and caregiver…

Purpose: Developmental functional modules (DFMs) are biological modules that are defined by their structural (morphological), functional, or developmental elements, and, in some cases, all three of these. This review article considers the hypothesis that vocal development in the first year of life can be understood in large part with respect to…

There is evidence showing that both maturational and environmental factors can impact on later language development. On the one hand, preterm birth has been found to increase the risk of deficits in the preschool and school years. Preterm children show poorer auditory discrimination, reading difficulties, poor vocabulary, less complex expressive…

The aim of this review is to identify the behavioural soothing interventions (BSIs) used for reducing infant crying and to determine their effect. Studies had to describe an experimental study addressing infant crying and BSIs in the first six months after birth. Searches were performed in Web of Science, Pubmed, Science Direct, EBSCOhost,…

Infants are born highly sensitive to the natural patterns found in languages. They use their perceptual sensitivity to acquire detailed information about the structure of languages in their environment. To date, most studies of infant perception and early language acquisition have investigated spoken/auditory languages and hearing infants (e.g.…

Consonants and vowels differentially contribute to lexical acquisition. From 8 months on, infants' preferential reliance on consonants has been shown to predict their lexical outcome. Here, the predictive value of German-learning infants' (n = 58, 29 girls, 29 boys) trajectories of consonant and vowel perception, indicated by the…

Providing adequate parental support is pivotal when treating excessive infant crying, but there are indications that parents may not feel supported by professional health care. This study investigated maternal satisfaction with health care and health care needs, comparing mothers of infants with (N = 110) and without a medical cause for the crying…

Recent behavior analytic studies have examined behavioral skills training to teach adults to arrange safe infant sleeping environments. These studies were conducted in an analogue environment and with all training components delivered by an expert staff trainer. The purpose of the current study was to replicate and extend this literature by…

A fundamental question in psycholinguistics concerns how grammatical structure contributes to real-time sentence parsing and understanding. While many argue that grammatical structure is only loosely related to on-line parsing, others hold the view that the two are tightly linked. Here, I use the incremental growth of grammatical structure in…

This study investigated whether some factors regarding especially pregnancy and post-pregnancy and 0-36-month-old infants' exposure to digital screens played a role in the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) scores of 4-11-year-old children. The cross-sectional research method was used. The sample consisted of the mothers of 2835…

The authors examined technological and traditional infant toys to understand the U.S. toy market facing today's care givers. They found significant differences in the two types of toys in terms of their developmental targets--with more traditional toys aimed at physical development and more technological toys aimed at cognitive development. Given…

Perception is not an independent, in-the-moment event. Instead, perceiving involves integrating prior expectations with current observations. How does this ability develop from infancy through adulthood? We examined how prior visual experience shapes visual perception in infants, children, and adults. Using an identical task across age groups, we…

Neurologic insults in infancy can have significant long-term effects on developmental processes including attention and learning; however, the heterogeneity of diagnoses and treatments in this population often lead to exclusion from interventional trials to improve outcomes. This study sought to determine whether hospitalized infants with neural…

Communication-intervention strategies for reducing vaccine hesitancy have been primarily based on survey and interview data. Virtually absent is an understanding of how vaccine hesitancy is organized interactionally in its primary, natural environment of medical consultations between parents and healthcare providers. This article uses conversation…

Purpose: The objective of this pilot study was to investigate the relationship between infant vocal characteristics and later speech motor impairment in children at risk for cerebral palsy (CP) to inform the early prediction of speech motor impairment. Method: Vocal complexity, volubility, and consonant inventories of 13 infants at risk of CP were…